


Multicursal

by Ladybug_21



Category: London Spy
Genre: Character Study, Depression, Gen, Mathematics, Period-Typical Sexism, Serious Gothic Horror Vibes, mazes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-08
Updated: 2020-07-08
Packaged: 2021-03-05 02:00:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,600
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25126627
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ladybug_21/pseuds/Ladybug_21
Summary: Watching Daniel Holt from the window, Frances suddenly recognised that only the people who had understood her son could navigate the hedge maze with ease.
Relationships: Alex Turner & Frances Turner, Danny Holt/Alex Turner
Comments: 4
Kudos: 9





	Multicursal

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by this captivating [character study](https://archiveofourown.org/works/6218413) of Frances Turner by [Diary](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Diary/pseuds/Diary), in which Alex and Frances are mentioned as habitually spending time in the hedge maze. Once that concept was lodged in my mind, I couldn't help but start developing headcanons around it. Also, this fic really was supposed to be very Alex-centric, but somehow Frances and all associated gothic horror aesthetic took over the entire story—which frankly seems pretty in-character. I own no rights to _London Spy_.

The hedge maze had been on the property for generations, dating back to the reign of William and Mary, when the wigged and powdered owners of the estate had blindly followed the latest continental fashions out of Hampton Court. Its pathways had fallen into of disrepair over the years, though, as such amusements waxed and waned in popularity. By the time the Turners were deposited at the manor in disgrace, the hedges had grown wild, blocking throughways and obscuring niches that held ornamental statues, leaving only the occasional hand or foot of a bronze nymph or satyr protruding from the dense foliage.

The overall pattern, however, was still quite discernible. Frances Turner, gazing out the window of her new gilded prison, memorised the entire grid and the permutations that governed its deviations, within ten seconds of noticing its existence.

Of course, it was no longer really sport, for an exceptional mathematician who had seen a maze from above to solve it. The mystery of the twisting patterns was utterly lost for Frances, who wandered the maze's corridors while absently tracking her progress using the perfect map in her head. But mystery was not what Frances needed in her life right now. Mystery, after all, was what had turned her life into a living hell.

Frances had been living as a trapped woman for years, ever since she had made the mistake of marrying a man whom she regarded with a combination of resentment and indifference and scorn. But a cage forged of cocktail parties and glamour was dazzling. Hadn't she reached the pinnacle of achievement for a woman of her status? She smiled through each dinner party, all the while using one finger to trace into the serviette on her lap the equations that could graph the curls of a guest's hair or derive the precise volumes of the cut-crystal wine glasses and punch bowl (a gift set from a defector from Prague who had warmed Frances's bed for a month while Charles was making his way through Paris with his trousers down). What did it matter that she had numbed herself to the lion's share of life, took lovers out of boredom rather than passion, still dreamt of blackboards covered in equations that she had not seen since her years at Cambridge? She was _successful_ , and in her world—her family's world—that was what mattered.

But then her useless husband, who for so long had been unobtrusively mediocre, suddenly blundered his way into being abjectly injurious, and all of the beautiful lies on which Frances had draped her illusions of content were tugged roughly from her hands. After so many years of intense denial, it added extra insult to injury for Frances to realise, with a sudden crush of despair, how desperately unhappy she was. In her darkest moments, Frances wondered if she wasn't to blame, as well. After all, she had fucked all of the moles as part of her general parade through the ranks of MI5; she had had her opportunity to sniff them out, even if she lacked access to the files that should have allowed Charles to trace patterns and movements back to the obvious suspects. She sometimes wondered if her own disdain for her husband and his ilk had blinded her to the fact that, despite their simplicity, some of the second-rate minds might have had just enough imagination to throw their lot in with the Soviets.

After having lived ensnared for years, the bleakness of the estate made her captivity impossible for Frances to ignore. Desperate for escape of some sort, she tried the usual methods of forgetting who she was and what she had done and how her life would play out from now on. Disgustingly but predictably, Charles only truly cared about potential _scandal_ —Frances was certain that he couldn't care less whether she died of alcohol poisoning or liver failure, or whether she fucked every man in the county, so long as she was discreet about it. She was his accessory, and accessories were sometimes lost irrevocably or picked up by others. The key was that Frances mustn't cause a fuss, because that would make her seem like an independent variable in her own life. More than once, she teetered precariously on the edge of the abyss and considered killing herself, simply to spite Charles with the resulting scandal—only she couldn't bear the thought of his ultimately winning their silent struggle for dominance.

Ironically, the one place where Frances felt that she could truly escape was the suffocating closeness of the hedge maze. She had the gardeners prune back the overgrown branches; Ariadne-like, she instructed each to tie a slender rope about one wrist, a rope which he then could follow back through the maze when his work was done, to where its other end was tied to a stake at the maze's entrance. And Frances spent her days wandering the newly manicured paths, dazed, almost meditative. Time did not exist in the hedge maze, other than the slant of the shadows across the gravel. Here, she could be completely alone, shielded from the sneers of onlookers, momentarily invisible to the agents sent to monitor her behaviour, lost to thought and memory behind the thick walls of branches.

Charles, of course, hated the hedge maze, as he hated anything that smacked of imagination, as he hated anything that seemed to make Frances at all happy. Frances caught him watching her from the window, once or twice, when they first arrived. But the first time Charles tried entering the maze himself, he was lost for a solid four hours. The gardeners nearly followed his epithet-laden, shouted instructions to cut through the hedges and rescue him, only Frances arrived in time and deftly located him within its twists and turns. The maze survived the ordeal unscathed. Charles's pride did not. He never set foot in the hedge maze again. The entire household quietly understood that it now fell within Frances's domain alone.

In the maze, Frances was allowed to be nobody. _Nemo_ , _neminis_ , _nemini_. But being a nobody in isolation was a desperately lonely endeavour, even it was slightly preferable to being a somebody surrounded by idiots and hounded by her own shame. One could not live in the maze; it was an escape, after all, and the life of an eternal fugitive was not one that Frances particularly desired. She knew she had to find some rope to tie around her own wrist, a thread to anchor her to reality when tugged from outside the maze, before she pressed too far forwards and was devoured by the Minotaur at its centre. She did not expect the person holding that thread to be a tiny boy drawing in the condensation on the window of a filthy room, drawing something that was orderly and angular and utterly beautiful. Frances realised that she was holding her breath as she watched the child, whose colouring books were filled with geometric figures and crudely sketched fractals. When she had first spotted him, she had wondered for a surreal moment if he was outlining her maze on the glass.

Frances re-emerged from the hedge maze not to return to her old life, but to turn around and plunge back into its depths with her new son's hand clutched in her own. She had entered it long ago as Charles Turner's wife, spent years wandering its paths as nobody, and now she reclaimed her realm as Alistair Turner's mother. Frances had been careening wildly in the dark for years, and it was strange to realise that this child held her hand because he trusted her to know the right path. Now that someone else was relying on her, she resolved to set a course and hold it steady, no matter what gales buffeted her. The day that Alistair pulled his hand from hers and ran ahead, certain of the path forward himself, Frances felt a sudden loss, although she was comforted that he still looked back at her, smiling in delight. But she felt nothing but pride the day that he solved the maze himself—not yet five years old, still far too short to puzzle out its pattern from the window (and Frances was not the type to pick him up so that he could see).

It became their secret world, a place where they could retreat from the scoffs of Charles and his boorish manservant, where they could bring books and paper and spend the afternoons tracing parabolic graphs and discussing integrals. Frances did not by nature love people, but her extraordinary little boy was the very embodiment of the discipline that gave her existence meaning: order, regularity, complexity, all revealing a spellbinding beauty, all concealing a devastating power. The only person who ever dared to disturb them in the maze was Alistair's nanny, who followed them, day after day, desperate not to lose sight of the boy who was no longer exactly hers. The woman was not a mathematical genius by any stretch of the imagination, but she learned the path to the centre of the maze by heart, for no other reason than to know that she could always reach her son, if he needed her. Initially, Frances was annoyed by this intrusion, but she permitted it. And all the while, she trained Alistair to think like a spy—to recognise patterns, to speak an array of languages, to trust no one. They sat at the foot of the ivy-covered statue and she drilled him, day in and day out, until one day he asked for a room, because one couldn't write on hedges, and he wanted a larger surface than a sheet of paper could provide.

The maze felt very lonely again, when Alistair got his room. As she wandered the old, familiar paths, Frances often looked back up the manor, knowing that her brilliant son was inside, surpassing everything that she could have ever hoped he would be.

By the time Alistair left for uni, Frances had far less need for the maze. The immediacy of Charles's disgrace had fallen away over the years; the unhappy couple had established a routine by which they acknowledged each other as little as possible; and Frances, feeling horrifically conventional, had decided that it was high time she remodelled the house. Her focus moved indoors, to the marble statues and the tarnished chandeliers and the fine oak staircases (Frances reconfigured them in idle musings to twist upwards and downwards across the ceiling, in architecturally implausible schemes that rivalled an Escher lithograph). Alistair returned home seldom as his life in London took root. The last time he would ever come to the estate, Frances found him sitting at the centre of the maze, looking somehow very small, despite how athletic he had grown in the prime of his youth. She asked him what was wrong. He told her about his project, because at the centre of the maze—where they had broken open the orderly and eternal truths of mathematics together—it felt impossible to lie. They fought. She shouted at him to destroy his research (for all the good _that_ would do, he knew exactly the degree of danger with which he was flirting). In the end, she stormed out of the maze and retreated upstairs, and when her son did not appear for dinner, she peered out the window to see where he was. Alistair still sat at the foot of the ivy-covered statue, his knees drawn up to his chest. His gaze met hers, and Frances shuddered as she stared down at her foolish boy, trapped in the centre of his own brilliance and stubbornly refusing to take the path out that he could have navigated with his eyes closed.

It was the image emblazoned in her mind as she pressed her forehead to the trunk and listened to her son's muffled voice lie and lie and lie and lie again.

When Frances Turner finally picked herself off the gravel drive of her estate, she did not follow her husband back into the manor. Instead, she stumbled into the grounds, unsteady from whatever they'd injected into her neck, and reeling from her inexpressible, overwhelming grief. Once within the maze, she could sob without reservation, her anguish muffled by the comforting closeness of the hedges. She curled up at the foot of the ivy-covered statue, letting her fine clothes become increasingly soiled with grass stains and mud—as if by waiting there long enough, Alistair might wander into the centre of the maze, a serious expression on his face, a book in his hand. (Even as she had come to realise how much he hated her for denying him the childhood he had deserved, Frances had always believed that Alistair despised her least in the moments that they spent quietly reading in each other's company.) Hours passed. Frances couldn't have said how long she spent there, enclosing herself in a cocoon of hopelessness and self-loathing, wishing numbly that it was she smothered in that trunk in the attic, and Alistair sitting here at the centre of the maze where he had been honed into a weapon too dangerous to retain. She might have stayed there forever, wasted away like the grieving Niobe, if the one other person who knew how to navigate the maze had not come after her. Sensing that she was no longer alone, Frances looked up and saw Alistair's nanny—Alistair's other mother—staring at her, her eyes glistening with some combination of accusation and resignation and deep understanding. The servant stepped to the side, patiently waiting for her employer to rise and lead the way out of the maze. And, moving slowly as if in a trance, Frances did; because if this poor woman, who had had nothing but her son and now had lost even that, was determined to soldier on somehow, then so must Frances. (Although, were they so different? Setting aside the cold grandeur of the mausoleum in which she lived, had Frances ever had much besides Alistair, other than her unappreciated intellect and her simmering bitterness?)

Frances might have remained numb forever had she not seen the article about Daniel Holt. It took her some time to recognise that she was feeling something once again, and then even longer to realise that what she was feeling was rage. This man—this _boy_ —who had been the cause of Alistair's fatal lies, claimed to have loved her son. How could a man with no talents, no education, no insight whatsoever into the larger patterns of things, have even _begun_ to appreciate who Alistair was? A mind like Alistair's was not for the common person on the street to engage. Within his entire life, Frances felt that there were only three people who had ever appreciated Alistair as thoroughly as he deserved: his nanny, out of sheer, slavish devotion to her offspring; his university tutor, albeit with the slight bitterness of a genius who has met his better; and herself, at the intersection of both sentiments but with less sentimentality and no rancour. Three was a good, stable number; triangles were reliably strong shapes. Daniel Holt simply did not fit the pattern. Frances smirked slightly as she watched him hurl his belongings at the foot of the manor's steps.

But then she noticed him wandering through the hedge maze.

Watching Daniel Holt from the window, Frances suddenly recognised that only the people who had understood her son could navigate the hedge maze with ease. She, of course, could do so because she and Alistair had shared the same streak of genius; they were able to solve the puzzle through intellect and logic that she had taught him to focus and hone. Her son's other mother, by contrast, had forced herself to learn the maze through sheer repetition, fully aware that she could and must provide her boy with comfort and care that Frances could not. Daniel Holt was entirely different from either of them. There was neither logic nor discipline to his navigation of the maze, only curiosity and willingness and a refusal to be deterred every time he hit a dead end. Frances was certain that, when Daniel Holt had espied the hedge maze from the window, he had not stopped to think it through while it lay before him; he was the type to wander through life, rather than plan. No doubt this was how his pursuit of her son had unwound—pushing forward bit by bit, retreating as necessary, never mapping his next step, never questioning that he would eventually reach the centre, never fearing what might await him if he reached the core of who Alex Turner truly was. And yet, suddenly, there he was, placing his hand on the ivy-covered statue's pedestal. Daniel Holt had made it to the centre of the hedge maze through sheer intuition. Frances could not help but be impressed.

It was not the last time he won her respect that evening. Of course he had his petulant moments, but Daniel Holt's breaking of protocol was not a matter of ignorance, but of rebellion. Frances hated to admit that she could see what Alistair must have seen in him; the man was utterly unpolished, but he was street-smart and canny, and there was a sincerity in the crude bluntness of his manner. She took no small degree of pleasure in feeding him lies that she hoped hurt him as much as he had hurt her, and she was impressed anew when he saw through her ruse. When the unkempt, uneducated young man crawled into Alistair's childhood bed and cried himself to sleep, Frances let him remain there—he had earned the right to wrap himself in that much loneliness, in a futile search for comfort. Much as she resented him, Frances could see that Daniel Holt had genuinely loved her Alistair, his Alex. Although the unwitting cause of his partner's death, this mystic, who had worked his way to the heart of the hedge maze using intuition and determination alone, clearly was grieving just as deeply as Frances was herself.

The next time she saw Daniel Holt, she invited him to wander the dark, twisted paths of her guilt, his intuitions leading to the right questions whose right answers were nonetheless terribly wrong. And, before the evening was out, the hedge maze outside was burning, set alight by a woman who had memorised its topography solely for a son who was now lost forever. Frances watched as her counterpart staggered out of the inferno and collapsed on the lawn, strength spent in her furious efforts to destroy the mathematical labyrinth in which her little Alex had grown more and more distant. Frances shut the door behind Daniel Holt and listened to the roaring blaze outside consume the one place where she had always been able to hide. By dawn, the plot would be nothing but flat, charred earth; even if another hedge maze were planted, it would not reach its full height until long after Frances herself was dead.

Frances climbed the stairs and moved to the window again. Alistair's nanny had picked herself up and was making her way haltingly back towards the house. The statue at the heart of the hedge maze was an indistinct blur at the centre of the flames. And Frances felt a sudden jolt as everything fell into place and she realised that, forced out of hiding, she was free. For so long, she had charted a relentless course for herself and her son, aimed towards the heart of a political and diplomatic maze whose centre, she now could see, had never been fixed and had never been worth reaching. With the borders crackling into ashes around her, and her hand cold and empty of any trusting grasp, Frances knew that she no longer need worry about toeing the line for anyone's sake. She had believed for far too long that there was only one sure path into and out of the maze, but they had changed the rules mid-course for her brilliant son, cut off the exits behind him. That which had been resolvable through intelligence and logic was now simply a whirl of multicursal illusions. Perhaps her worthless husband had been right, for once, in seeing that it was better to tear the entire maze down, than to be trapped inside of it for too long.

Never in her life had Frances Turner intentionally veered towards a dead end. But Danny Holt, who never planned but who had loved her son, might still have enough matches up his sleeve to make it worthwhile. It would be enough to see the structures burn, even if the two of them faced the walls of flame with no hope of escape. There would be as much poetry in that ending as in the mathematics that would be both their destruction and their salvation. And, if they somehow managed to succeed, she might yet have one final laugh at this feckless dinner party of spies and consummate liars. She and her son might yet leave a legacy to shame all those who had sought to blot their brilliance from the history books. _Quod erat demonstrandum._

Smiling grimly, Frances seized her coat, opened the door of her prison, and stepped out into the smoky night air, an independent variable at last. They would ultimately fail, of course. But first, she vowed silently to her son's memory, she and Danny Holt would cause quite the fuss.


End file.
